The image caught me by surprise. Unlike most images that dissolve quickly with the next sense impression, this one kept reverberating. What was so captivating about it?
The image was of a vase made out of pottery. It was beautiful, with graceful lines, fired in a soft Celadon green. When you looked closely, there was a random pattern of tiny cracks crisscrossing the surface. Clearly, the vase had broken and been painstakingly repaired. It turns out that this is an ancient process known as Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery. Rather than throwing the pottery away, the broken pieces are assembled and carefully reconstructed with a special compound imbued with gold. Gold! Clearly, that pattern of tiny gold lines added to the beauty of the vase.
The metaphor took on a life of its own. What about our feelings of brokenness? These moments come and go, driven by a spectrum of emotions—sadness, anger, helplessness, fear, despair, and so on. Besides our personal spectrum of feelings, we’re surrounded by the brokenness of the world, the examples too numerous to mention.
- What is brokenness asking of us? How do we find healing?
- We remember our closest ally—the calming presence of the breath.
- We bring awareness to our varying mood states, cultivating equanimity.
- We remember the wise perspective of the law of impermanence.
- We take refuge in the present moment, the only moment in which healing happens.
- Above all, we return over and over again to the continuity of awareness that threads through all of our experiences. Every moment of awareness brings clarity, peace, and spaciousness, and opens the doors of insight.
The gold in our lives is every healing step we take toward wholeness. At times, our brokenness feels overwhelming, but that signifies our humanness and invites compassion for ourselves. However modest it may be, our aspiration is to heal our tiny corner of the universe – to heal our brokenness with the gold of awareness. Our aspiration to heal becomes a gift to the whole, for that is the reality of our interconnectedness and the mystery of the metaphorical gold.
May the image of the gold from the art of Kintsugi invoke a moment of beauty and inspiration for you. Remember, too, the well-known verse from a Leonard Cohen song, “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”